James Fallows

I've had a similar reaction to politicians and pundits (virtually always on the right, it seems these days) who assume that just because they are for something, the people on the other side must be against it, or vice versa.

So, if they think there should be "less government," then the rest of us all think the answer to every problem is "more government." Or because they purport to be single-mindedly focused on less spending, the rest of us are for out-of-control spending. It puts a straw man front and center and then bashes it, which the press doesn't call out enough either.

I am particularly amused by the current meme that somehow the blame lays at Obama's, and by extension, the Democrats' feet.  So they have to give in because everyone understands that the Republicans are so set in their views that they won't change, so it's up to Obama to compromise?

I think that this ties in with the new attention that Emily Bazelon has given to the problem of bullying with her book [and related Atlantic article] Sticks and Stones.  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that bullying exists, even in adults.  Furthermore, bullying by supposed adults often works at the highest levels of politics and business.  In sum, if a group of kids acted like the Republicans in Congress, refusing ever to even even acknowledge that there are legitimate points of view that contradicted their own, and refusing to do anything unless they got their way completely, wouldn't the teacher think that they were attempting to bully the rest of the class?

I share your frustration with the false equivalence that's practiced by the big newspapers.

But I wonder if I might offer a perspective on bipartisan think based on my discipline: the history and sociology of science.

You say in one of your posts that the thinking behind it seems to be that reality is somewhere between the positions of the two parties. And there's something to that. But I think one of the ways of explaining it is using a concept called "boundary work." 

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis. 

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work -- between "politics" and "policy." Our politicians will always say: what I'm doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that. 

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can't say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one's own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it's what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don't, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr's history of the media) is that it's a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements -- and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) -- and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

Interestingly enough, we're now back in more partisan times, thanks to the Web. And it's interesting to me that you, Matt and others who call the editorials on their false equivalence operate in a completely different new media ecosystem; you have readers of a certain kind and stripe (but lots of them thanks to the reach of the Web), you don't really need to be bipartisan. But I think the example of Ezra Klein proves my point: ever since he's moved to the Washington Post, he's a lot less rough(er) on Republicans than he used to be. He won't fall into the false equivalence trap for sure but he's certainly adapted to a different audience. (I think it's great that he's reaching more people).

So - I don't think the WaPo is ever going to abandon its false equivalence model; not unless it becomes a completely new kind of WaPo (which it might very well become!).

I don't mean to suggest of course that all editors are dumb actors acting out a premediated sociological script; just that the roots of false equivalence go pretty deep into our current system.

I suspect this analysis is not particularly new to you (with some jargon added!).

I've been in the Air Force for a little over four years, and was in training for four years before that. I've recently returned from a small cantonment in the desert, and am stationed overseas in the western Pacific. And I'd like to tell you that the sequester is having a very real effect on our lives here.

But first, a brief recent history lesson. As long as I've been in the Air Force - even when I was a cadet and we were in the midst of two wars, the military has tried to do more with less. In 2006, the Air Force cut down its personnel numbers in an effort to save money that could be used on newer planes. Naturally, the less people meant there was a higher deployment tempo - people were heading to the desert for longer amounts of time and more often. To make up for the smaller number of military personnel, contractors and civilians were asked to take on a bigger role.

I'm sure you've heard about how big a presence contractors have in these wars - the reason for that is a government attempt to save money. Shortly after that, when the recession hit and the stimulus came and left, again we were in a "constrained fiscal environment," as our leadership likes to tell us. For the past 3 years, we've been cutting back, spending less on staying trained and ready, trying to decide what training we could go without for the short term until things get "back to normal."

And now that sequester has hit - while we're still in Afghanistan, mind you - what is it that the military is cutting? We're not cutting any missions - all those will continue on, somehow, despite a cut to half of our operational budget. But instead, our training and readiness funds have been cut to the bare minimum. The belief is that it'll come back when things go "back to normal." But worst, of all, our benefits have started to get cut. DOD civilians - who have grown in number as uniformed personnel have shrunk - have just been given a 20% paycut across the Pacific. And for the military, college tuition assistance funds have disappeared across the services.

I don't know whether to rant against Congress, or our military leadership, including the President. I know Congress is responsible for the sequester. But it's the Pentagon who has decided to cut pay and benefits rather than cut missions. We've been doing "more with less" for a half a decade now, all while waiting for things to "get back to normal." Is this really what the people, what Congress wants? That our military is now prepared to do just as much as it did before, but without a force as well trained as before? And with civilians and military taking a significant haircut?

Even if you think the military has gotten too "entitled" with our free healthcare and assistance for college - there are still people fighting out there in a dangerous place. I'm back safe and sound, andwas lucky to have a quiet deployment. recently But I have more than a few friends getting shot at, mortared, and getting blown up while driving down bomb infested roads. Can't we wait until after 2014 before doing this?

I don't know if I'm making a false equivalence in blaming both the executive and the legislature and the pentagon, but frankly I don't care. I understand the military has to share in the burdens of thecountry - but why are our entitlement programs the first to go? The Murray budget plan includes still more military cuts, while the Ryan plan instead is nice enough to just go after veteran's programs. And this isn't even the policy argument talking about our 30-50 year old planes, ships, and weapons. And I know that the military is only feeling part of the pain - the same thing is happening in every federal program across the country.

And all this so that some big shot millionaire can keep his Bush tax cut?

A Death in the Family
By Wen Stephenson

We got the news, of course, on Twitter: "Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck."

That tweet came yesterday afternoon from the Boston Phoenix, the storied but struggling alt-weekly, for which the current print issue will be its last. There will be an online-only issue next week, containing an important piece by my friend and fellow climate activist-journalist Bill McKibben. And then the rest is silence.

But a lot of us can't stay silent, and won't. There are a great many people in Boston right now, and around the country, who care deeply about everything the Phoenix has always represented, right down to the end -- smart, fearless, fiercely independent journalism -- and want to say a few things about what this means for our impoverished media landscape.  Many thanks to Jim for lending me this space to offer a few words of my own.

I was proud to be associated with the Phoenix, even if briefly. My cover story last fall, called "A Convenient Excuse" (right), took serious issue with the way our mainstream media has covered -- or failed to cover -- the climate crisis. One of the places I criticized was The Atlantic (though I spent seven years as an editor at the magazine, from 1994 to 2001, and still have friends there). [JF note: see my discussion of that piece.]

The Phoenix has run three more of my pieces on climate and the climate movement in these past four months (you can find them, for now at least, here); the last one was just this week, an online piece about a stunning student-led protest against the Keystone XL pipeline at the TransCanada office in Westborough, MA, in which 25 (mostly young) climate activists were arrested for peaceful civil disobedience (a remarkable local story, with national resonance, that the Boston Globe, incredibly, has failed to cover).

There's a reason I'm mentioning these pieces, and it's not to promote my own work (ok, maybe just a little; I'm a freelance writer who just lost my main outlet!).  In all sincerity, it's to pay heartfelt tribute to my editor, the guy who commissioned and expertly edited these pieces -- the last editor-in-chief of the Boston Phoenix -- Carly Carioli.

To put it simply and bluntly: Carly championed not only the climate issue but, equally important, the young and increasingly powerful grassroots climate movement, at a time when virtually no one else (outside of environmental blogs and magazines) could be bothered to give them a serious thought. Those pieces of mine -- to my utter amazement -- went somewhat viral, garnered national attention to the Phoenix, and put the climate movement on the map for a lot of readers. I know an awful lot of people right now who feel a piercing sense of loss, and powerlessness, and quite frankly, real anger, knowing that the only widely-circulated publication in Boston paying serious attention to climate change has gone away.

In today's paper, the Globe's editorial page had an eloquent euology for the Phoenix, where editorial page editor Peter Canellos, like a long list of other accomplished journalists, spent some formative years of his career.  Acknowledging the Phoenix's "proud journalistic tradition," the editorial notes that the alt-weekly's audience "was anyone who believed that powerful institutions and other engines of society deserved a kind of scrutiny that went beyond mere reporting, and who wanted to see the fundamental ills of the social order exposed." And it concludes:

Now, with Thursday's announcement of the Phoenix's demise, much will be written about the paper's impact on local politics, music and film criticism, and the various journalistic careers it launched. It's a substantial legacy, by any measure. But better to focus on the careers that might not be launched, the questions that might not be asked, and the stories that might not get told.

Yes, it's a little ironic to read that on the Globe's editorial page, in whose offices (as I described in the Phoenix) I protested the paper's lack of climate coverage.  We can only hope that the Globe -- or somebody -- will fill the void now left on Brookline Ave. in Boston.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a hugely controversial ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, but the measure faces nearly certain defeat on the Senate floor....

The Senate now faces a floor fight in coming weeks over Democrats' push to dramatically alter U.S. gun laws for the first time in two decades. While the Feinstein assault weapons ban is unlikely to overcome GOP opposition and get a vote -- as well as concerns from red state Democrats up for reelection in 2014 -- Democrats and the White House will continue their drive to enact universal background checks on all gun sales.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that the assault weapons ban will have a hard time overcoming opposition. "It's pretty clear the other side is locked in opposition [to assault weapons ban.] -- [I] don't see us getting 60 votes," Whitehouse said, referring to the necessary bar to pass the Senate.

• It takes 51 votes to "pass the Senate."
• It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster.
• Through the past six-plus years, the GOP minority-power strategy in the Senate has deliberately aimed to make the filibuster, historically a rarity, seem routine and acceptable. Every news account that presents the super-majority 60-vote threshold as the "necessary bar" for Senate passage, and a majority of 55 votes as "certain defeat," ratifies this strategy. Especially in an "informed" insider political-specialist publication.
  

It wouldn't take any extra space to make things clear. The first highlighted passage could say "nearly certain filibuster" rather than "nearly certain defeat." The last passage could say "necessary bar to break a filibuster" rather than "necessary bar to pass the Senate." To look on the bright side, the middle highlighted reference is exactly right: the strategy is designed to keep the proposal from ever coming to a vote. (Thanks to AS for the lead.)

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Let's see if we can make a better case for Iraq. I was a "liberal hawk," and I think I still am. In part I guess I was encouraged by the silence, or ecouragement, of the ex- Clintonites, and nobody beat the drum harder than the New Republic. [JF note: unless it was the WaPo's editorial page.]

But the reason I supported the war, and still suspect it was the least bad choice, isn't one you've addressed and it's one I find opponents tend to evade. I mean, sure, get rid of a bad guy, yes, maybe WMD, whatever. But the reason I thought we should go to war in 2003 is that the status quo ante really, really sucked.

I had been in the Arab world in the '90s and seen constant angry footage of people starving in a crumbling Iraq, held in that state by the U.S. military (I read figures of civilian lives lost, which are horrific -- and remember the UNICEF figure of 6,000 children under age 5 dying each month due to sanctions before the war). The large US military forces in Saudi Arabia protecting the Kurds, Basra and Kuwait infuriated folks -- remember it was bin Laden's big bitch -- and it ended soon after we went into Iraq. We had -- I think unwisely, but nonetheless -- effectively created client states in the North and South of Iraq dependent on US protection, and nobody has tried to make the case that there was any way to return Iraq to the Ba'athists without ugly consequences for those groups. And I've had the opportunity to speak with the airmen who flew the missions in support of that protection while under Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, and over a decade of that really dangerous work took a toll on them and their families. So I think the "let's not go to war" case might've been superior -- but let's not kid ourselves that it wasn't ugly, too.

In the early 2000s, the Bushies I think made the best of all possible options in pushing so-called "smart sanctions," saying, look, we're stuck in this mess for the long haul so let's invest the manpower to try real real hard to keep certain things out of the regime's hands, and get as much food and medicine into Iraq as we can. And I think they did the diplomacy OK -- at least, before the thing went up for a vote in summer 2001, other countries were making the right noises about it. There had just been an awfully contentious election, folks at least where I was were _mad_ and I heard a lot of crap about Bush trying to push this thing through the UN because of his pathological hatred of the Iraqis -- but it was crap. "Smart sanctions" was a good idea, actually. And it died an ugly death at the UN, so your choices at that point were, somehow unseat the regime, or continue with the sanctions regime as it was.

There are an awful lot of hard counterfactuals here. Who knew the Bushies would throw away a decade of expertise and interest in Iraq? And I have never understood why we needed to shepherd in a hand-picked government or even occupy the place -- I couldn't give a crap who rules Iraq so long as they know that if they mess with the populations in the North and South under U.S. protection they're going to get smashed -- but the war went the way it did and it was ugly, and we learned a lot of things about military accountability that, well, we're probably better off for having learned but it wasn't good. Certainly I didn't appreciate the importance of international "legitimacy" and alliance-building. But still I wish folks who opposed the war would have to append "I was for the continuation of the sanctions regime and basing forces in Saudi Arabia" (or else, "I was for the lifting of sanctions, and let what happens to the Kurds and Shi'a, happen") -- because it's a useful reminder that there wasn't a great path out of that hole. Some stuff's just really hard.

The whole democracy thing fatigues me. Since Nebuchadnezzar, every regime that has set out to attack another regime has done so with multiple public justifications (yes, even the most totalitarian). In the age of mass media, the justifications have become more elaborate, but all of the rationales boil down to three basic themes: (1) they were going to attack us first (aka the Texas manslaughter defense: "I was just protecting myself in advance"); (2); that other regime is really awful; and (3) the people groaning under the rule of that regime will be much better off once we invade and depose the regime. The Bush administration employed slightly different rationales for whichever audience it was trying to convince, but its main themes fit the historical template. All the bloviating about exporting democracy to the Middle East drew mainly from rationales (2) and (3).
 
What struck me at the time of the Iraq invasion was that the neoconservatives and their fellow travelers, mainly Republican but also some Democrats, frequently displayed the most touching devotion (in public) to bringing democracy to the suffering peoples of the Middle East while evincing a high degree of cynicism (mainly in private) about how "Arabs only understand force." In some cases it wasn't even concealed, as Thomas Friedman demonstrated:

"What they [meaning Iraqis] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying, "Which  part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This. . . . We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth." (Charlie Rose, 30 May 2003) 

It's not yet clear how much funding the National Labs will lose, but it will total tens of millions of dollars. Interrupting -- or worse, halting -- basic research in the physical, biological, and computational sciences would be devastating, both for science and for the many U.S. industries that rely on our national laboratory system to power their research and development efforts.

Instead, this drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years. This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the word races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions in missed future opportunities.

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were about 2000 'operational' weather balloon sites that released balloons synchronized to be in the middle of the troposphere at 00 and 12 UTZ daily.

When I did a survey of how many there were in 2000, there were about 800. There are myriad reasons, the relative poverty of many countries that can't afford to pay for the programs and geopolitics among them.

The number is about to drop precipitously due to a contrived crisis by a rich nation.

I am deeply ashamed for my country.

TSA ... might not be willing to admit it, but they seem to have come to terms with two simple truths.

The first is that a potentially deadly sharp object -- a knife, if you will -- can be improvised from virtually anything, including no shortage of materials found on airplanes. Even a child knows this.... 

The second truth is that, from a terrorist's standpoint, the September 11th blueprint is no longer a useful strategy.... 

Conventional wisdom holds that the attacks succeeded because 19 hijackers took advantage of a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto jetliners. And conventional wisdom is wrong.

What the men actually took advantage of was a weakness in our thinking, and our presumptions of what a hijacking was, and how one would be expected to unfold, based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.

"Now is not the time for reduced vigilance," he said in a statement, "or to place additional burdens on TSA agents who should be looking for dangerous items, not wasting time measuring the length of a knife blade."

"In the confined environment of an airplane, even a small blade in the hands of a terrorist can lead to disaster."

We need to get past the emotionally charged style of security-think that ultimately makes us less safe. These new measures are sensible, and meanwhile TSA can, or should, concentrate or more potent threats to safety -- your safety as well as mine -- such as bombs and explosives.

Ten years later, it's clear that the Iraq war cast "a very large shadow" indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity's natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.

If you would like to eliminate uncertainty about the origins of this view, I direct your attention to a signed contribution from the editor of the Post's editorial page, Fred Hiatt, on why "Obama could get things done by governing today." Please read this and see if your reaction is other than ... wow.



Yes (the essay itself says), the Republicans are wrong in their extremism, and in their refusal to consider any increase in taxes, and in their willingness to filibuster anything. And, yes, the president has been offering compromises, in atmospherics and in substance. But still all sides are necessarily to blame for a partisan stand-off. And the president could solve this mess if he decided to "govern." The payoff of the column, in the form of an open-letter appeal to the president:

And beyond politics, on many of the biggest challenges you're going to need ideas from Column A and Column B... [Y]ou can't solve the debt challenge without raising more revenue and controlling entitlement costs... Eventually, in other words, you're going to have to wheel and deal and compromise -- you're going to have to govern. It might as well be now.

• Does he propose a budget plan modeled on ideas from revered centrists like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, or Robert Rubin? Oh, wait, he's already done that.
• Does he propose dealing with entitlement reforms? Oh, wait, that was in the State of the Union address.

Imagine that Mitt Romney had decisively defeated Obama in the 2012 election on a platform of tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to government as the only way to reduce the deficit, dramatically repudiating the President's call for higher taxes on the wealthy, continued implementation of the biggest expansion of the safety net in 60 years, and more government spending to boost the economy.

Then imagine that Democrats in the Senate (the only part of government they controlled) responded to this by proposing to dramatically expand health care and stimulus spending and pay down the deficit only with 100 percent tax hikes -- and not a single penny more in spending cuts -- and on top of that, then suggested President Romney has failed to sincerely try to find common ground with them.

As an academic in the Earth Sciences, I would argue that threat deflation is rampant (but not in national security issues). Looking at where threat-deflation is common, and where threat-inflation is common, helps us to understand where either occurs. 

If you look at many threats to society, for example anthropogenic climate change or cigarette smoking, there are or were large campaigns to downplay either the impact or existence of these threats.  They are funded by organizations with a clear interest in the matter -- coal companies and tobacco companies in these examples. It takes energy, time and money to inflate or deflate a threat.

Peculiar to national security issues is that there usually no clear organized group that benefit from deflating the threat -- some general will make his career being the first leader of the new Cyber Command.  Is there anyone who can make a career saying it is not necessary?  Will any politician be celebrated for stopping some effort to "make us safer" in anywhere near the same proportion that he or she would be vilified when something bad happens? Are there any consultants who will earn large fees telling us something is not worth worrying about?  Why would we pay someone to deal with non-threats?

Threat inflation may be bad for everyone, but it is good for someone -- a tragedy of the commons, if you will, where the commons is our pool of resources to either deal with threats or to invest in society. 

I am a graduate student studying the proliferation of nuclear technology (especially centrifuges for uranium enrichment) in the Engineering School at [distinguished East Coast university.]  [He goes on to name advisors with extensive experience in assessing weapons threats from the Middle East and elsewhere, and with reputations for skepticism about some claimed threats.] In this email, I speak only for myself.

Regrettably, I've found, this field of study is replete with slanderous rhetoric and name-calling on both sides of the spectrum, a good portion of  which is propelled by the colossal egos of a few with especially influential voices.  Mostly because I am loath to participate in such unpleasantries, I will keep my comments as brief and benign as possible.

For the record: I believe that military action in Iran is completely unwarranted at this point and will remain so for (at very least) the near future.

While I am thankful for the growing body of scientific experts willing to speak out and counterbalance our nation's penchant for "threat inflation,"  I worry that a number of anti-war scientist/activists are guilty of the same fundamental offense as their Bush-era nemeses: allowing their political agendas to shape their technical assessments.  Technical experts who maintain an a priori commitment to nonintervention can frequently do more harm than good.  By softening the facts, downplaying suspicious activity, and gratuitously applying the "alarmist" label to any and all who oppose them, these analysts weaken the public discourse and undermine the ability of the IAEA to insist on transparency from nations like Iran.

In a recent post, you link to two op-eds by Yousaf Butt.  (I feel obliged to stress that both are op-eds and quite likely do not reflect the position of many or most Bulletin scientists.)  Like many of my colleagues, I cringe when the Washington Post, for example, levels sweeping allegations at Iran based on a tiny amount of new (even if credible) information.  So, I applaud Butt in one sense.  Unfortunately, though, based on my own reading of the evidence, I cannot agree that he has "debunked" much of anything:

1. No loudspeaker magnet, barring a truly remarkable coincidence, would require the exact dimensions of the magnets in Iran's centrifuges, down to the nearest one-thousandth of a centimeter in two of the three specifications and to the nearest millimeter in the third.

2. While the diagram he attacks in his second piece is by no means a smoking gun, the reasoning that leads him to call it  " either slipshot analysis or an amateurish hoax," was later shown to be a mixup in units -- he simply didn't have sufficient information.

While I worry often about nuclear matters and "threat inflation," and while I am critical of the current trend that sensationalizes every alleged example of Iranian deception, I do believe in this statement, taken from a recent rebuttal to Butt: "the public needs to know the facts about Iran's nuclear program, even when uncomfortable, in order to design a responsible reaction to Iran that avoids war."

Faced with mounting evidence that my films were born of a time and circumstances that had passed, I resolved that Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl would be the last film, and that it was time to move on to something else.

So what did I decide to do?

I decided to start a sustainable energy eco-tourism project in the community where I live. This project has a educational component for local school children which I hope we'll be able to provide at little or no cost. That's my attempt to skip as much of that "flinty middle stage" of life as possible and get on with the giving back part of my life while my heart still beats strong and true.